NASA announced Monday a $17.7 billion budget request for fiscal year
2013. The budget does not enable NASA to move forward with the planned
2016 and 2018 ExoMars missions in collaboration with the European Space
Agency.

The new plan envisions that one of the first deep space missions for astronauts will be to visit an asteroid. Image credit: NASA.

NASA announced Monday a $17.7 billion budget request for fiscal year
2013. While the budget supports a program of space exploration that
will build on new technologies and proven capabilities to expand
America's reach into the solar system, this budget does not enable NASA
to move forward with the planned 2016 and 2018 ExoMars missions in collaboration with the European Space Agency.

2.13.2012

New images from the Planck mission show previously undiscovered islands
of star formation and a mysterious haze of microwave emissions in our
Milky Way galaxy. The views give scientists new treasures to mine and
take them closer to understanding the secrets of our galaxy.

This all-sky image shows the distribution
of carbon monoxide (CO), a molecule used by astronomers to trace
molecular clouds across the sky, as seen by Planck. Image credit:
ESA/Planck Collaboration

Planck is a European Space Agency mission with significant NASA participation.
"The images reveal two exciting aspects of the galaxy in which we live,"
said Planck scientist Krzysztof M. Gorski from NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Warsaw University Observatory in
Poland. "They show a haze around the center of the galaxy, and cold gas
where we never saw it before."
The new images show the entire sky, dominated by the murky band of our
Milky Way galaxy. One of them shows the unexplained haze of microwave
light previously hinted at in measurements by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave
Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

2.10.2012

Over the next three years, the NEOShield project will investigate how to
prevent dangerous impacts with asteroids and comets that could befall
the Earth in the future. The study could also lead to a better
understanding of the composition, structure and surface texture these
space objects.

When asteroids approach Earth, they typically do so at a speed of
between five and 30 kilometres per second. Thousands of near-Earth
objects (NEOs) have been discovered in the past 20 years. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech